Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel

by Amy M. King

Overview

Starting from the botanical crazes inspired by Linnaeus in the eighteenth century, and exploring the variations it spawned—natural history, landscape architecture, polemical battles over botany's prurience—this study offers a fresh, detailed reading of the courtship novel from Jane Austen to George Eliot and Henry James. By reanimating a cultural understanding of botany and sexuality that we have lost, it provides an entirely new and powerful account of the novel's role in scripting sexualized courtship, and illuminates how the novel and popular science together created a cultural figure, the blooming girl, that stood at the center of both fictional and scientific worlds.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195161519
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	10/23/2003
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	9.20(w) x 6.10(h) x 1.20(d)
Lexile:	1560L (what's this?)

About the Author

Amy M. King is Assistant Professor of English at St. John's University

Editorial Reviews

"The intricate cultural web linking nature, flowers, sex and marriage with the English novel is clearly drawn and persuasively developed.... Bloom combines meticulous attention to the detail of cultural history and vigorous readings of nineteenth-century fiction with the breathless excitement of someone who has stumbled upon a story never previously told."—Times Literary Supplement

"A fascinating and unique thesis.... The volume represents a significant and meticulously documented contribution to the study of the interrelations between 19th-century science and literature."—Choice

"The intricate cultural web linking nature, flowers, sex and marriage with the English novel is clearly drawn and persuasively developed.... Bloom combines meticulous attention to the detail of cultural history and vigorous readings of nineteenth-century fiction with the breathless excitement of someone who has stumbled upon a story never previously told."—Times Literary Supplement "Amy King's Bloom is that rarest of academic studies—a book which the Victorian reader would have enjoyed, and learned from, as much as we do."—John Sutherland, University College London

"By bringing together human courtships and botanical systems, King persuasively demonstrates how writers were able to imbue fiction with sexuality, while still remaining perfectly decorous.... This is a study that not only illuminates how courtship narratives can be replete with sexual reference and yet still 'respectable,' but also perfectly demonstrates how the tracing of the implications of just one highly charged word brings out the inseparability of scientific and literary cultures."—Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

"Touch a reference to a 'blooming girl' in novels about courtship and marriage, and watch what happens! Amy M. King's insightful study shows that knowledge of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century botanical culture can open rich layers of meaning for metaphors that we too easily take for granted. A fully successful cross-fertilization of ideas between literature and science."—Ann B. Shteir, York University

"In an account that is both learned and lovely, Amy King highlights for novel readers a rhetoric and a set of references that inform and underwrite the novel's treatment of the marriageable girl. Commenting on her bloom becomes a way of describing the emergence of the adolescent girl, of announcing her availability for the marriage plot in a way that both acknowledges and disguises the sexuality of that readiness. Showing us that bloom is a concept with a history, King's Bloom is a full and fresh explanation of how the novel convinced us that female development is an organic process leading to a social end in marriage."—Mary Ann O'Farrell, Texas A&M University

"Bloom includes wonderful, fresh readings of Adam Bede, Watch and Ward, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Wings of the Dove, among others."—Linda Peterson, Yale University

From the Publisher